‘Many chief finance officers are now doing smaller outsourcing projects focused on optimising specific finance activities of their business to third party providers to secure longer term stability,’ according to Jim Muir, director at financial data management specialist AutoRek – rather than undertake relocation exercises every few years in order to exploit wage arbitrage.
But getting the most from this sort of initiative requires careful planning. ‘CFOs considering a move to BPO, or even shared services, should examine what smaller process improvements can be made before outsourcing specialists start implementing plans to transfer work to new teams and locations,’ suggested Muir, as the risk of process failure and baseline costs can both be increased if best practices are not embedded into business and finance processes before work is transferred.
